The XRP Ledger just hit 8 million activated accounts for the first time. That sounds like a growth story. Look closer, though, and the picture gets more complicated.
Daily active addresses on the network fell roughly 61% in one June 2026 snapshot, dropping to around 7,800 on its worst days and sitting near 25,350 during mid-year readings. The total number of funded wallets keeps climbing, but the share of those wallets actually doing anything on a given day has shrunk considerably.
What’s filling the gap is the size of the transactions that remain. Average transaction value on XRPL reached somewhere between $85,000 and $86,700 in 2026, a figure that reportedly surpasses the per-transaction average of both Bitcoin and Ethereum. When fewer people are moving money but each transfer is worth roughly the price of a suburban home, that tells you something meaningful about who is still showing up.
A network in transition
The ledger crossed 8 million activated accounts in July 2026, up from approximately 7.85 million in March. New account creation has continued, averaging around 2,300 fresh wallets per day since March, though the pace of additions has slowed from earlier peaks.
Transaction counts, meanwhile, paint an interesting contrast with the falling active-address numbers. Certain periods showed a 38% rise in total transactions alongside a 110% jump in transactions per ledger, even as overall payment volumes declined. More transactions, fewer active accounts, larger individual transfers: the ledger is doing more heavy lifting per session, not more sessions overall.
The clearest explanation sits in what those transactions are increasingly made of. RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, has been expanding its issuance on XRPL. Tokenized real-world assets are also proliferating on the network, with associated value running into the hundreds of millions and, in some readings, into the billions. Both categories skew toward institutional counterparties settling large positions rather than retail users making small payments.
What institutional gravity means for XRPL’s positioning
The expansion of tokenized real-world assets on the ledger fits a broader market trend. Across multiple blockchains, asset managers and financial institutions have been piloting or deploying tokenized versions of treasuries, money market funds, and other instruments.
RLUSD’s growth on XRPL adds another institutional-grade layer. A regulated stablecoin anchored to the dollar and settling on a ledger purpose-built for high-value transfers is a more compelling argument for a bank treasury desk than for a retail crypto trader.
The retail cooling, though, deserves honest acknowledgment. Daily active addresses in the low thousands represent a significant contraction in grassroots network participation.
The regulatory backdrop matters here. Ripple’s multi-year legal dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission effectively resolved in the company’s favor on key points, removing one of the larger clouds over the token and the ledger. That outcome opened doors with regulated financial institutions that had been waiting on the sidelines, which likely contributed to the institutional activity uptick visible in 2026’s on-chain data.
For investors watching XRP as a proxy for network health, the metrics demand a framework update. Traditional crypto valuation heuristics lean on daily active addresses and transaction counts as signals of organic demand. XRPL’s 2026 data suggests those numbers need to be weighted against average transaction size and the composition of network activity. A ledger moving billions in tokenized assets through fewer, larger transactions can be healthier in economic terms than one generating thousands of tiny transfers from speculative retail flows.